


it hits you all at once

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 23:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11046465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: Rationally, she knows what this is.A nightmare.





	it hits you all at once

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackEPeace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackEPeace/gifts).



> For a swap that was just supposed to be Ophelia centric, but I am trash for this ship, so this happened.

_ Panic _ . 

That’s what she feels.

Raw panic, the kind that has her jolting up out of her sleep, gasping out, terror thudding through her veins. 

If she closes her eyes she can see it all so clearly again, the impassive and unimpressed look on his face. She can  _ feel  _ it, an open wound in her chest, the pain which had been her first shadow of a feeling now coming back to haunt her again. 

Instinctively she reaches out towards the other side of the bed. The very real  _ fear  _ she still feels lingering in her body only increasing at the feeling of a cold bed beside her. 

Rationally, she knows what this is.

A nightmare.

She’s never had one before - there are so many things she had yet to experience - but that does not mean that she cannot identify the sensation. Not when she had seen Leopold experience them too many times to count. 

Even within the Framework, even when she had been able to take away his regrets, he had fallen victim to nightmares time and time again. Waking up gasping or crying out, shaking in his sleep, reaching out for her the second that he did. She had not known how to comfort him there, had not understood how these terrors could persist even within code she controlled. 

She remembered what he once told her, that most of his nightmares were about losing her. 

At the time she hadn’t understood it. Hadn’t understood his need for comfort, his need to be assured that she was alive and to feel her stimulated pulse until his body calmed down.

Now though, with her own  _ real  _ heart thudding rapidly in her chest, she understands it.

She understands it far too clearly. 

The dark is too much, oppressive around her, the space too empty - she needs to leave.

It would be so easy to teleport out of there, to use the powers given to her for her protection to go somewhere else, somewhere less frightening than an empty bed in a house that is too quiet.

Or, no.

Not that quiet.

When she listens properly, ignores the lingering thrum of fear through her body, ignores the deafening sound of her heartbeat, she can hear other noises, the noises that remind her that she was not entirely alone here.

A soft rustling sound, a clink of a cup against a wooden table. 

She’s out of the bed an instant later, following the sounds, she doesn’t have to go far, just to the living room. 

Only the lamp on the table is on, illuminating the space dimly, but enough that she can make him out, curled up against the side of the couch as though he wanted to take up as little space as possible. A book open in his lap, a cup of tea sitting on the end of the table. 

He looks up when she enters the room, eyes meeting hers for a brief moment. 

They’re still on rocky ground, still trying to figure themselves out, where they stand and where they go from here. Still, he chose her, he came with her, instead of letting the his team kill her, and that had to count for something. 

They weren’t entirely the people they had been inside the Framework, she knew that now. That they had to take things slow, take things from the beginning. It had taken them a while to even get to this point, slowly moving around each other's space, until that morning he kissed her in the kitchen and she finally understood why humanity was so focused on the concept of falling in love. 

She could feel things she had never been able to feel before, and Leopold had two lives worth of memories to sort through. So it was a process, one with more than enough setbacks.

But he was here, worry causing lines between his brows as he watched her, a question coming easily to his lips, “Bad dream?” 

She nods her head. 

“Me too,” he admits. Soft and quiet, so that she might almost miss it, but she doesn’t. 

“Why didn’t you wake me?” she asks. 

Afraid of the answer.

Afraid that she is now the monster in his nightmares.

It wouldn’t be remiss. Wouldn’t be undeserved. 

She had told him before that he could leave, that he didn’t need to stay here with her, that she understood now what it felt to be human and what it felt to want to leave. 

He didn’t leave. 

But he also doesn’t answer her question.

This is itself feels like an answer. 

The fear from her nightmare has turned into something else, something real. That terrified part of her mind that remembers how it had hurt to die at the hands of someone she loved as if it were reality and not simply the makings of her sleep addled mind. 

“I’m sorry,” she says quickly, turning to leave. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ll get a glass of water and go back to-”

“Ophelia.”

She always forgets how to breathe for a moment when he says her name. 

The name she chose for herself. 

“Yes?”

His voice is tired and weary, but she watches as he carefully shifts as if to offer the other part of the couch to her, before he says, “I dreamed about you dying.” 

She takes it, the unspoken offered space to sit down beside him. 

Lets him do, as he had done before in the framework, reach to feel the pulse at her wrist. This time a real one, a rapid one, because the nightmare is still fresh in her mind. 

The way Leopold looks at her now is so different from the way he had looked at her in her nightmare. Soft and kind and  _ hers _ .

“But you’re alive,” he says, “And it was just a dream.” 

A part of her wants to cry. 

Human emotions so strong and real and this feels like a moment to cry. She knows if she speaks she will, her voice will break with the sheer emotion that seems especially strong in the middle of the night. 

He continues speaking when she can’t, “Whatever it was, Ophelia, it was just just a dream, just a trick of the mind. You’re here and you’re safe.”

Safe. 

She still wasn’t entirely certain that she felt it fully yet, but perhaps, if she stayed here long enough on this couch beside him, she may. 

 


End file.
